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      Old cortex, new contexts: re-purposing spatial perception for social cognition

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          Abstract

          Much of everyday mental life involves information that we cannot currently perceive directly, from contemplating the strengths of friendships to reasoning about the contents of other minds. Despite their primacy to everyday human functioning, and in particular, to human sociality, the mechanisms that support abstract thought are poorly understood. An explanatory framework that has gained traction recently in cognitive neuroscience is exaptation, or the re-purposing of evolutionarily old circuitry to carry out new functions. We argue for the utility of applying this concept to social cognition. Convergent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence suggests that humans co-opt mechanisms originally devoted to spatial perception for more abstract domains of cognition (e.g., temporal reasoning). Preliminary evidence suggests that some aspects of social cognition also involve the exaptation of substrates originally evolved for processing physical space. We discuss the potential for future work to test more directly if cortical substrates for spatial processing were exapted for social cognition, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of how humans evolved mechanisms for navigating an exceptionally complex social world.

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          Most cited references58

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          Understanding and sharing intentions: the origins of cultural cognition.

          We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.
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            The mental representation of parity and number magnitude.

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              Evolution and tinkering.

              F Jacob (1977)
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Front Hum Neurosci
                Front Hum Neurosci
                Front. Hum. Neurosci.
                Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1662-5161
                08 October 2013
                2013
                : 7
                : 645
                Affiliations
                Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College Hanover, NH, USA
                Author notes

                Edited by: Antonia Hamilton, University of Nottingham, UK

                Reviewed by: Ivan Toni, Radboud University, Netherlands; Anna M. Borghi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, University of Bologna, Rome, Italy

                *Correspondence: Carolyn Parkinson, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6207 Moore Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, USA e-mail: carolyn.parkinson@ 123456gmail.com

                This article was submitted to the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

                Article
                10.3389/fnhum.2013.00645
                3792395
                08424627-6b2c-4db7-82ba-b3527b935255
                Copyright © Parkinson and Wheatley.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 15 July 2013
                : 17 September 2013
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 82, Pages: 7, Words: 0
                Categories
                Neuroscience
                Perspective Article

                Neurosciences
                exaptation,neural reuse,social neuroscience,metaphor,spatial cognition,perspective taking,social distance,posterior parietal cortex

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